Category: Blog Tour

#BookReview The House in the Hollow by Allie Cresswell @alliescribbler

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Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The House in the Hollow by Allie Cresswell. My thanks to Allie for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my digital review copy of the book.

The House in the Hollow by Allie CresswellAbout the Book

The Talbots are wealthy. But their wealth is from ‘trade’. With neither ancient lineage nor title, they struggle for entrance into elite Regency society. Finally, aided by an impecunious viscount, they gain access to the drawing rooms of England’s most illustrious houses.

Once established in le bon ton, Mrs Talbot intends her daughter Jocelyn to marry well, to eliminate the stain of the family’s ignoble beginnings. But the young men Jocelyn meets are vacuous, seeing Jocelyn as merely a brood mare with a great deal of money. Only Lieutenant Barnaby Willow sees the real Jocelyn, but he must go to Europe to fight the French. The hypocrisy of fashionable society repulses Jocelyn – beneath the courtly manners and studied elegance she finds tittle-tattle, deceit, dissipation and vice.

Jocelyn stumbles upon and then is embroiled in a sordid scandal which will mean utter disgrace for the Talbot family. Humiliated and dishonoured, she is sent to a remote house hidden in a hollow of the Yorkshire moors. There, separated from family, friends and any hope of hearing about the lieutenant’s fate, she must build her own life – and her own social order – anew.

Format: ebook (300 pages)                        Publisher: N/A
Publication date: 10th November 2020 Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance

Find The House in the Hollow on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon UK (99p for a limited time)
*Link provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The House in the Hollow (a prequel to the author’s award-winning Tall Chimneys ) opens with Jocelyn Talbot’s journey to the house of the title, with its eerie atmosphere of gloom and melancholy.   For Jocelyn it is the beginning of a period of exile the full reason for which will only gradually be revealed.  As she gets used to the isolation of her new surroundings she recalls earlier, happier days when, as the daughter of a wealthy family, her expectations of life were very different.

As an aficionado of Jane Austen, the author does a great job of replicating the satirical edge that Austen brought to her observations of contemporary society. For example, the disdain with which an offer to take tea is greeted rather than the sign of more favoured status, an invitation to dine. I particularly enjoyed the description of a dinner party at Binsley House, home of the eccentric Sir Diggory, at which casual snobbery, social pretensions, “fashion and empty affectation” are laid bare. Fans of Pride & Prejudice will also enjoy the efforts of various ladies to procure advantageous marriages for their daughters.

By introducing the point of view of Annie Orphan (so named because she was taken from the workhouse into service in the Talbot household along with another orphan, Sally), the reader gets a fascinating insight into the daily routine of servants in a large house. It also provides another perspective on the events that have led to Jocelyn’s exile. There are moments of melodrama too, many of which involve the magnificently named Lord Petrel.

I liked that the author took the opportunity to add diversity to the story by introducing a couple of characters who would definitely not have found a place in a Jane Austen novel. Moreover, that these characters are given responsible and useful positions in society. Continuing this egalitarian theme is Jocelyn’s gradual unpicking of the barriers that society imposes between her and the household servants, what she describes as a ‘very ridiculous, utterly artificial separation’.

I really enjoyed The House in the Hollow which, for me, had just the right combination of period detail, social history, romance and skillfully constructed storyline.  No surprise then that Tall Chimneys has been added to my wishlist.  To find out more about the inspiration for the book and how it became a lockdown project, check out Allie’s guest post hosted by Nicola at Short Book and Scribes.

In three words: Dramatic, engrossing, assured

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Allie CresswellAbout the Author

Allie Cresswell was born in Stockport, UK and began writing fiction as soon as she could hold a pencil. She did a BA in English Literature at Birmingham University and an MA at Queen Mary College, London. She has been a print-buyer, a pub landlady, a book-keeper, run a B&B and a group of boutique holiday cottages. Nowadays Allie writes full time having retired from teaching literature to lifelong learners. She has two grown-up children, two granddaughters, two grandsons and two cockapoos but just one husband – Tim. They live in Cumbria, NW England.

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#BookReview The Coral Bride (Detective Morales #2) by Roxanne Bouchard, trans. David Warriner @OrendaBooks

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Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Coral Bride by Roxanne Bouchard, the follow-up to We Were the Salt of the Sea. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Orenda Books for my digital review copy.

The Coral BrideAbout the Book

When an abandoned lobster trawler is found adrift off the coast of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, DS Joaquin Moralès begins a straightforward search for the boat’s missing captain, Angel Roberts – a rare female in a male-dominated world. But Moralès finds himself blocked at every turn – by his police colleagues, by fisheries bureaucrats, and by his grown-up son, who has turned up at his door with a host of his own personal problems.

When Angel’s body is finally discovered, it’s clear something very sinister is afoot, and Moralès and son are pulled into murky, dangerous waters, where old resentments run deep.

Format: ebook (400 pages)                 Publisher: Orenda Books
Publication date: 20th August 2020 Genre: Crime, Mystery

Find The Coral Bride (Detective Morales#2) on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*link provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The Coral Bride is set among the same close-knit fishing communities of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula as her first book featuring Detective Sergeant Joaquin Moralès, We Were the Salt of the Sea, a book I very much enjoyed. The events in The Coral Bride take place over the space of a few weeks at the end of the fishing season when the shrimp and lobster trawlers are brought ashore for the winter.

If you’ll pardon the pun, Moralès remains rather a fish out of water. He still feels like something of an outsider, not just because of his Mexican heritage or the fact that the life he imagined with his wife, Sarah, has not turned out the way he planned. It’s also that he finds it hard to adjust to the different pace and way of doing things in Gaspé, even from a policing perspective where so much depends on local knowledge.

Having been reassigned against his wishes, and for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, to what was initially a missing person case doesn’t help. Nor does being put in charge of an investigation team consisting of Erik Lefebvre, an officer who much prefers desk research to field work, and Simone Lord, a rather combative Fisheries officer. However, Moralès is conscious he will need to find a way to work with them because they possess the local and technical knowledge he lacks.

When the missing person case becomes a suspicious death, Moralès faces the knotty problem of discovering whether it was a case of murder or suicide. His investigation reveals fractures in the small community that go back decades and, like nearly everything in the Gaspé Peninsula, involve fishing and the sea.

The introduction of Moralès’ eldest son, Sebastien, a young man with his own personal problems, into the story provides a fresh perspective. Sebastien’s respect for and confidence in his father has been undermined both by the estrangement of his parents and rumours that Joaquin has been unfaithful. If true, the latter is a bit too close to home. As he confides, “All I’ve seen lately is a whole bunch of lies” and, given his own behaviour, he’s begun to doubt that loyalty is something he’s inherited from his father.

The book demonstrates once again the author’s skill at conveying the beauty and power of the sea, preserved in the translation from French by David Warriner. “Beyond the windows, the sea scattered incalculable shards of moonlight, their illusory fragments of silver shimmering on the surface as the horizon stretched into the night.” But The Coral Bride is also a tightly plotted crime mystery whose solution reveals itself in a satisfying manner.

The Coral Bride is another beautifully written, engrossing mystery from the pen of Roxanne Bouchard.

In three words: Atmospheric, intriguing, suspenseful

Try something similar: Containment by Vanda Symon

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RoxanneAbout the Author

Over ten years ago, Roxanne Bouchard decided it was time she found her sea legs. So she learned to sail, first on the St Lawrence River, before taking to the open waters off the Gaspé Peninsula. The local fishermen soon invited her aboard to reel in their lobster nets, and Roxanne saw for herself that the sunrise over Bonaventure never lies. Her fifth novel (but the first translated into English) We Were the Salt of the Sea was published in 2018 to resounding critical acclaim, sure to be followed by its sequel, The Coral Bride. She lives in Quebec.

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About the Translator

David Warriner grew up in deepest Yorkshire, has lived in France and Quebec, and now calls British Columbia home. He translated Johanna Gustawsson’s Blood Song for Orenda Books, and his translation of Roxanne Bouchard’s We Were the Salt of the Sea was runner-up for the 2019 Scott Moncrieff Prize for French-English translation.

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